LAUSR

fractured colonial regulation of gender and sexuality. One issue concerns Hinchy’s positioning of the hijra as the primary community targeted by the anti-eunuch campaign. While groups identifying as hijra certainly existed in the colonial period, colonial discourses adopted hijra as a loose overarching label into which various regional terms for gender variance were collapsed (Shane Patrick Gannon, “Translating the Hijra: The Symbolic Reconstruction of the British Empire in India,” PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2009, 22). Hinchy notes the porous nature of the colonial hijra category, and acknowledges that her identification of particular people as hijras is speculative since colonial archives did not necessarily note self-identification. Yet, at some points, she assumes a clear distinction between the hijra community as the main target of regulation and other identities like zanana, feminine males located outside hijra lineages, who seemingly evoked more sporadic concern. However, people outside lineage-based groupsmay call themselves hijra, and hijra identities may overlap with categories like zanana rather than forming a consolidated community (Aniruddha Dutta, “An Epistemology of Collusion:Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India,” Gender and History 24, no. 3 [2012]: 831). Therefore, isolating a coherently bounded hijra community as the primary focus of colonial regulation may be misleading. However, this is a minor drawback in an otherwise rich account that will be indispensable to those interested in the history of colonialism, gender, and sexuality in South Asia.